"The Robots Weren't the Hard Part": An Automation Lead’s Lessons From a 24/7 Smart Campus

By Express HR Solutions on 2025-08-20 17:09:16

When Rajesh Kumar was tasked with leading the smart facility automation rollout for a massive, 24/7 automotive ancillary campus near Pune, the roadmap seemed clear. It was a world of IoT sensors, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), and predictive maintenance dashboards.

"We all thought the biggest challenge would be the technology," Rajesh said, reflecting on the three-year journey. "Integrating the software, calibrating the robots, ensuring network uptime... that's where we focused our energy."

"We were wrong," he states bluntly. "The technology was the easy part. The people were the real challenge and, eventually, the real key to our success."

For any COO or Head of Facilities in India on the cusp of a similar automation journey, Rajesh’s hard-won lessons are a masterclass in what it truly takes to succeed.

Lesson 1: To Speed Up, Start with the "Worst" Jobs

The initial plan was to automate a complex part of the assembly line to get the biggest ROI. It was a mistake. "We were met with immediate resistance and skepticism from the line workers," Rajesh recalls. "We were trying to change the heart of their world on day one."

They pivoted. The new strategy was to find the most dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs on campus and automate those first.

The Quick Win: They deployed a small fleet of autonomous robots for two tasks: overnight security patrols of the vast perimeter and managing industrial sludge collection.

The result? "The security and maintenance staff were our biggest champions," he laughs. "We took away the parts of their job they hated the most. The security guards were moved to a central command centre, managing the fleet instead of walking in the rain at 3 AM. The maintenance crew could focus on high-value repairs. It proved that automation was a tool to help them, not replace them." This early win created a wave of goodwill that made every subsequent project easier.

Lesson 2: What Stalls Progress? Fear and Bad Interfaces.

Not everything went smoothly. The first major roadblock wasn't a technical failure, but a human one.

"Adoption stalls for two reasons: people are afraid you're taking their job, or the tech is simply too difficult to use," Rajesh explains.

The Fear Factor: When they began installing sensors for a new automated inventory system, a lack of clear communication led to widespread rumours of impending layoffs. "Productivity in the warehouse dropped by nearly 20% for a month," he admits. "We had to go into overdrive with town halls and one-on-one meetings, explaining that the goal was to eliminate stock-outs, not jobs."
The Interface Issue: Later, the team rolled out a new tablet-based app for maintenance technicians to log jobs. It was powerful, but the interface was cluttered and slow. "Our technicians are brilliant with wrenches, not with clumsy software," Rajesh says. "We saw them going back to their paper logbooks within a week." The project only got back on track after they involved the technicians themselves in redesigning the app to be simpler and faster.

Lesson 3: The Biggest Shift - Your Labour Strategy Must Evolve

This was Rajesh's most profound learning. The automation rollout fundamentally changed the kind of people they needed to hire and manage.

"We stopped hiring for muscle and started hiring for mindset," he states. "We no longer needed 50 people to move materials across the campus. We needed five skilled technicians who could manage, maintain, and troubleshoot the fleet of robots that did the moving."

This led to two major shifts in their workforce strategy:

The End of the Specialist, The Rise of the Multi-Skilled Technician: Their most valuable employees were no longer those with deep expertise in a single domain (e.g., a master electrician). They were the ones who were moderately skilled in several areas—able to perform a basic mechanical fix, comfortable reading a software dashboard, and capable of clearly communicating an issue.
The Need for a Flexible Workforce: They realized that a fixed, siloed team structure was inefficient. A machine breakdown might require an expert for two hours on a Tuesday, who would then be idle. The new model demanded a flexible pool of on-demand, multi-skilled technicians who could be dynamically assigned to problems anywhere on the campus, guided by the central automation system.

Your Automation Strategy is a Human Strategy

Rajesh's journey offers a clear conclusion for any leader in Indian manufacturing or facility management. A successful automation strategy is not about replacing people, but about augmenting them and fundamentally rethinking the skills your workforce needs.

"My advice is simple," he concludes. "Spend 30% of your time and budget on the technology. Spend the other 70% on the change management, the communication, and the reskilling of your people. Your robots will only be as smart and effective as the human team that directs them."

Rajesh's journey highlights a critical truth: as facilities become smarter, the demand for a new kind of workforce—multi-skilled, flexible, and tech-savvy—explodes. Traditional staffing models can't keep up. As a leader in strategic workforce management, Mumbai-based Express HR Solutions specialises in building these next-generation teams, providing the agile, skilled technicians needed to unlock the true potential of your facility automation.